Reflections on the state of the world which proceed with the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

An Angry Champion

An
Angry Champion

“Imagination…
its limits are only those of the mind
itself.”

“Every
man can and must search for his own dignity.” – Rod Serling

Please
Understand Me,
the Kiersey.com blog devoted to information about the Kiersey Temperament
sorter, recently ran a short essay on one of my all-time heroes, Rod Serling.
Best known for his eerie black and white episodes of The Twilight Zone on 1960s television, Serling had a long creative
life marked by friction with the powers that be both within television and the
corporate boardrooms without which even then sought to control America’s
communication systems.

Scary, Troubling Stuff

I had always loved the Twilight Zone as a kid. In all honesty, some of those episodes
scared the bejezus out of me. I remember in particular the episode about the
howling man, locked in a prison cell in a monastery in Europe, proclaiming his misery
and the cruelty of his incarceration. The intimidating abbot of the monastery
warned the visiting business man from America that this was a mere ruse, that
the pitiful figure in the cell was actually Lucifer, the devil himself, and
under no circumstances should he open the door of the cell.

Predictably, the American is moved by the
protestations of the prisoner and ultimately opens the cell to allow for his
escape. As the prisoner moves down the hallway to the open doorway to a balcony
at its end, his appearance changes. The horns appear, the scepter comes to his
hand, his cape unfurls. All the while the businessman is forced into a
supplicant posture on the floor by an unseen force. By the time the now-transformed
howling man reaches the window, Lucifer is ready to fly off into the night sky.
Neither he nor the frightened eight year old boy from rural Central Florida watching that show would
sleep that night. I also knew by the end of the episode that, like the
well-intentioned businessman, I would have foolishly let the howling man out as
well. My Dad was right: good intentions do on occasion pave the road to Hell,
sometimes quite literally.

By the time I had reached junior high, it had
become clear to me that the Twilight Zone
was not just about cheap frights. Serling’s pieces inevitably nudged me into
consciousness, into recognizing that there was something deeper at work in each
of these episodes. I found myself wondering what question he was really posing
in each episode. What was the moral lesson I was not picking up on? What aspects
of life in 1960s America was Serling prompting his viewers to consider, perhaps
in ways we’d never thought about them before?

Of course, I had no way of putting into words
the fact that I was also experiencing a boyhood crush on this clean cut, chain smoking,
deep throated and extremely serious man whose dark features were accentuated by
his inevitable dark suit, white shirt and tie. At that point in my life, I had
no idea what any of those feelings even meant. I just knew that Serling titillated
me in just about every way possible. And I also knew that at the end of each half
hour show, I always needed some time alone to process what I’d just seen to try
to make sense out of it.

A Troubled, Angry Young Man

What I did not know then was that Serling was
widely seen as a trouble maker in both the New York of his young adulthood as
well as the Hollywood of his exile. Serling had just come home from helping free
the Philippines from the Japanese invaders in WWII. He arrived in an America
brimming with unspoken tensions from segregation to the fascist-like censorship
and repression of the McCarthy era to
the (Mutually Assured Destruction) MADness of the Cold War. He quickly became intent
upon forcing Americans to look at things they did not want to see – the depravity
of the recently concluded Holocaust, the fears of a coming computer age in
which our technology would quickly outpace our ethics and the shallowness of an
exploding suburban life which was touted as the American Dream. As Serling
said, “I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I
got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest.”

Not surprisingly, Serling’s energy for confrontation
with America’s conscience made him a lightning rod in a television industry
just coming into its own after the war. “Corporate
sponsors quickly became squeamish about his penchant for the unorthodox and the
unnerving. While Serling had a lot to say, they wanted to edit it or censor certain things, for
they were paying for it. They didn’t want anyone to say anything that might offend,
and lose the audience, for sponsors and advertisers want eyeballs for their
brands and products: not thoughtful and controversial explorations of the human
mind and condition.” (“An Angry Champion,”
Keirsey.com)

Serling had come
to be known as television’s “Angry Young Man” even as his television
productions on first Playhouse live television theater and later his serial recorded
Twilight Zone episodes shot to the
top of American viewer ratings.

Tired of seeing his
scripts butchered in manners that removed any political statements, ethnic
identities, and even the Chrysler Building being removed from a script
sponsored by Ford, the frustrated, angered Serling decided that the only way to
avoid such artistic interference was to create his own show.

In an interview with
Mike Wallace, Serling confessed, “I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want
to have to battle sponsors and agencies. I don’t want to have to push for
something that I want and have to settle for second best. I don’t want to have
to compromise all the time, which in essence is what a television writer does
if he wants to put on controversial themes.” – Wikipedia

It is tempting to
see figures like Serling as just being angry young men. In such simplistic
visions, the anger is inevitably seen as the problem of the one who is angry. That
allows the outsider to ascribe the problem entirely to the angry man without
any consideration of why the man
might be angry. It’s also a particularly effective way of avoiding any
responsibility for the aspects of the situation that gave rise to the anger,
particularly if one happens to be complicit in the situation.

This aspect of
Serling’s embattled life reminds me of the way that women who had become
conscienticized during the consciousness raising days of the early women’s
liberation movement were routinely dismissed as “angry feminists” as if that
somehow explained everything. I often ask my students when we study this period
how one is supposed to respond when they
come to realize the extent to which they have been treated as less than human
and the degree to which their own acquiescence to - if not willing
participation in - that dehumanization permitted that indignity to continue? It’s a bit like the sadistic parent who spanks
their child and then shrieks, “Now, don’t cry or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”

We become the
grave diggers

But Serling had a
good reason for being angry. Having seen some of the worst aspects of human
behavior during WWII and coming home to an America in denial about any number
of social tensions preparing to explode one decade later, Serling was angry about
America’s dedication to playing an ill-timed game of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Serling feared that the teachable moment
about the recent world war with its machine-like dispatch of 12 million souls
in a Holocaust and its safely distanced off-site detonation of two atomic
blasts with their mass slaughter of 125,000 souls could be lost. He said,

All the Dachaus must
remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes
-all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment
in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they
shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all
their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be
haunted by its remembrance, then we become the grave diggers.”

It was an anger
born less out of a judgment of human shortcomings than a desire to actively confront
those shortcomings, to make America the place of which its own ideals of
liberty and justice for all spoke. It was an anger born out of a love for
humanity beginning at home but ultimately stretching to include the whole world.
His friend, the late Gene Roddenberry put it well: “No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without
recognizing his deep affection for humanity … and his determination to enlarge
our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves.” And Serling
was clear that it was precisely the combination of forcing ourselves to look at
our most desperate problems with a sense of responsibility for confronting our
social ills that offered a way to insure that human societies never again
become their own grave diggers.

The dilemma of
the Idealist Champion

The Aha! moment in reading the Serling article for
me came with the revelation that we shared the same MBTI temperament, ENFP
(Extraverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving) and Keirsey type, Idealist Champion. Here is some of the description
from the Keirsey site:

Like the other Idealists,Champions are rather
rare, say three or four percent of the population, but even more than the
others they consider intense emotional
experiences as beingvital to a full
life. Champions have a wide range and variety of emotions, and a great passion for novelty. They see life as an exciting drama, pregnant with
possibilities for both good and evil, and they want to experience all the meaningful events and fascinating people in the
world. The most outgoing of the Idealists, Champions often can't wait to
tell others of their extraordinary experiences… Champions often speak (or
write) in the hope of revealing some truth about human experience, or of
motivating others with their powerful convictions. (N.B. -Perhaps like this
blog and my Facebook site?) Their strong
drive to speak out on issues and events, along with their boundless
enthusiasm and natural talent with language, makes them the most vivacious and
inspiring of all the types. (N.B. – It also makes them social lightning rods)

Fiercely
individualistic, Champions strive toward a kind of personal authenticity…At the same time, Champions have outstanding
intuitive powers and can tell what is going on inside of others, reading hidden
emotions and giving special significance to words or actions. In fact,
Champions are constantly scanning the
social environment, and no intriguing character or silent motive is likely
to escape their attention. Far more than the other Idealists, Champions are
keen and probing observers of the people around them, and are capable of intense concentration on
another individual. Their attention is rarely
passive or casual. On the contrary, Champions tend to be extra sensitive
and alert, always ready for emergencies, always on the lookout for what's
possible.

Champions are good with people and usually
have a wide range of personal relationships... Champions are positive,
exuberant people, and often their confidence
in the goodness of lifeand of human
nature makes good things happen. (emphases and parentheticals mine)

Here lies the
dilemma of the Idealist Champion. On the one hand, Champions want to save the
world. Literally. All of it, starting
with the plight of the most vulnerable. Indeed, we feel we have no other
choice. To do that, Champions, whose big picture iNtuition is dominant, MUST
confront the ills of the world with little or no anesthesia. We feel driven to continually
call our fellow human beings to their own highest potential, bringing the
reality of our common settlement for mediocrity with all of its injustices into
stark contrast with the ideals we say we believe and the potential for humane
societies those ideals promise. In short, we must reveal the very real Twilight Zone existing all around us all
the time that we so readily see and which the world has so studiously ignored. And
we must not let people close their eyes when we do.

On the other
hand, Champions are also Feelers. We want people to like us. We crave
relationship. And we want to be both recognized and valued for our hard work
and taken seriously when we complete that work, no matter how disturbing it
might be. We want what rarely occurs - to be simultaneously welcomed by those whose
dreams we have disturbed– something we do with little effort and much skill - and
affirmed by those from whom we have taken away the last vestiges of the luxury
of naîveté they had previously enjoyed. Little wonder we frequently find
ourselves conflicted, confused and disappointed.

While I hardly
place my own life on the same scale as the all-too-brief life of Serling, (he
died at 51), his biography does provide no small amount of affirmation if not
inspiration. If I take nothing else away from this revealing essay on Rod
Serling, it is the comfort of knowing there are other Champion Idealists in the
world who have known the same kind of rejection, sometimes even loathing and deep
disillusionment, that I have at times experienced in my own life. While that makes
the predictable responses from a world the Champion would selflessly and often sacrificially serve no less painful, it does make that often solitary path seem
a bit less lonely.

Perhaps most
importantly, Serling’s history reveals something essential to those of us among
this tiny fraction of human beings who would call humanity to its highest
potentials as a people: the anger we often exhibit is rarely borne out of
control issues, out of self-serving, out of fearful insecurities or the mere
desires to have our own way. The anger is rarely just about ourselves, even in the
inevitability of our darkest moments of despair and cynicism. We aren’t just
angry men and women. And while it’s an easy out to simply dismiss us as such,
it’s also dishonest and simplistic.

The anger that
one sees in the Idealist Champion more likely arises from the broken hearts of those who
find the avoidable suffering of any living being intolerable. It erupts
unbidden from the vision of a human potential which is unlimited when
consciously and intentionally pursued but frequently unrealized, unsought and
avoided. Most of all, it springs from an almost endless hopefulness about
humanity that, while frequently disappointed, is never fully extinguished.

The world rarely values its Idealist Champions but it always needs them, if for no other reason than to periodically remind us, in the wisdom of Rod Serling, that “Every man can and must search for his own dignity” and
that when it comes to “imagination…
its limits are only those of the mind
itself.”

About Me

I am a fifth generation Floridian, a fourth generation educator, third generation college educator. My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright so I guess it was fate that I would end up a teacher. I am a recovering lawyer who still holds an inactive license with the Florida Bar (I stopped practice in 1990) and an ordained Episcopal priest. My spirituality is that of an inner world (nature) mystic. I am Franciscan to my very core, a professed member of 26 years in the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF). Andy , my gentle souled, soft-spoken partner of 44 years became my legal husband in 2010 on the steps of the US Supreme Court. He is G-d's greatest gift to my life. I live within two hours of my nuclear family members. Historically I have been a yellow dawg Democrat though my politics are decidedly Green. I hold a Ph.D. in Religion, Law and Society from FSU, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, member seminary of the GTU in Berkeley, CA, and a J.D. and a B.A. in History and Secondary Ed from the University of Florida. I complete a two year program at Richard Rohr’s Living School for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM August 2017.